We
are in the final month of Barack Obama’s Presidency before Donald Trump comes
in and attempts to undo everything that Obama has done in the last eight years.
If you want to enjoy this last month and not think about the future to come,
you could do worse things than put on a double bill of Vikram Ganhdi’s Barry –
which just debuted on Netflix, and is about a couple years in Obama’s life in
New York as a University student in the early 1980s – and Richard Tanne’s
Southside With You – a indie hit at the box office this summer, newly arrived
on VOD platforms – which is about Barack and Michelle’s first date in Chicago
in 1989. Both films are at times heavy handed – leaning too much on the
President Obama was going to become, and occasionally the actors playing him
(and in the latter film, Michelle as well), work too hard to do an impression
of him. Yet both films show an idealistic young man, struggling with his
identity – and the man he wants to become. To me, Barry is clearly the superior
film – it has a larger scope, and allows Obama to be a more fully rounded
character (and sometimes, an asshole), whereas Southside With You leans harder
on the great man stuff. But as a double bill, the films are fascinating.

The
Obama is Barry is more often than not, quiet. The film shows him reading and
thinking a lot – lost in thought (usually smoking). He is grappling with things
that he doesn’t verbalize very much during the course of the movie – there’s
only one real scene set in a classroom in Barry, where he and other students
debate politics – which ends on a great note, when one of the white students
asks Barry why everything always comes back to slavery – something Barry
doesn’t dignify with a response (we’ll return to that other character again in
the film, and again, Barry doesn’t really respond). The film is, in many ways,
about Obama walking a kind of strange line – he barely knows his father – he
carries around a letter from him, and spends most of the movie trying to write
a response (which he is, ultimately, too late to send). He loves his mother –
Ashley Judd, wonderful in just one sequence – but is also exhausted by her. He
starts to date Charlotte (Anya Taylor-Joy, from The Witch) – who is white, and
who introduces him to her liberal, do-gooder parents (Linus Roache and Jenna
Elfman), who try very hard to not make it seem that they are trying very hard
with him. Their relationship will, of course, run its course eventually – but
the fault for that mainly lies with Barry, who isn’t ever able to really
explain to her his feelings, or why it’s awkward for him and her to be
together. There are other minor characters, who are basically present to show
Barry with different groups – his white roommate (Ellar Coltrane, from
Boyhood), who seems cool with Barry, but maybe not some of his other friends,
Saleem (Avis Nash), a drug taking Indian who indulges Barry’s wilder side, and
PJ (Jason Mitchell, from Straight Outta Compton), as a kid from the projects
working to get his Ivy League education to get out of them – who, in the film’s
most memorable sequence, takes Barry to those projects to show the guy who
spent most of his life in Hawaii or Indonesia how many black people live. Barry
undeniably leans too heavily on the man Obama will become for its impact – if
you didn’t know this man, you may well wonder why they’re making a movie about
him – and there are some awkward moments (the wedding conversation Barry has
with an inter-racial couple for instance) – but mainly film works – mainly
because newcomer Devon Terrell is so good as Obama.

Southside
with Me is the better known film – unlike Barry, which debuted at TIFF this
September, and then bought by Netflix, it actually did receive a theatrical
release, and did well for an indie of its size. It’s also the more highly
praise of the two films, which is odd to me, because while I admired parts of
the film, I more often than not found it awkward – and that the two stars tried
too hard to mimic their famous characters. Richard Tanne’s films is about a
long summer day turning into night in Chicago in 1989 – when Barack Obama –
then a summer intern at a high profile Chicago law firm, asked out a second
year associate, Michelle Robinson, for what he thinks is a date, and she is
adamant is not one. Over the course of the day, the two talk, and flirt – she
silently judges him for all the cigarettes (the one thing the two movies share
is the Obama smokes a lot in both) – as the pair go to an art gallery, drive
around, go to a community meeting, and end the evening at a screening of Spike
Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

The
film is at its best when it is most relaxed – the pair talking about the art
they see in the gallery for instance, or discussing Do the Right Thing. It goes
off the rails for me a few times when it tries to strain for importable – most
notably in an extended sequence where Obama gives a speech to a community group
he is involved with – where we keep flashing to Michelle in the audience, and
get the feeling that this is the moment she falls for him. In this way, the
film resembles Barry – both films are about a central romantic relationship –
yet one that the film really does fail to see in any sort of sexual way (I
understand that for Barack and Michelle, it was a first date, and they didn’t
have sex then – yet there is no real erotic charge between them anyway – it’s
all intellectual).

Southside
with You clearly wants to be an Obama version of Before Sunrise – the Richard
Linklater movie, where Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy fall in love, over the
course of one long night spent talking. The difference is, that relationship
felt natural – here is feels forced and strained as often as it feels natural.

Still,
what both films do is show the man who would become President at various,
specific moments in his life – which allows you to see the way he’d change, and
the way he’d stay the same. America is about to go through who knows what under
President Trump – I think they’ll miss the calm leadership of Obama, but what
do I know. What these two movies – imperfect as they are – serve to do is remind
you that Obama is a person as well, and what kind of person he is.

About Me

I am an accountant, living in Brantford, ON - and although I am married and have beautiful daughter, I still find time to watch a lot of movies. This blog is mostly reviews of new movies - with other musing thrown in as well.